How to cover the worst MLB team ever without going (too) insane

“I don’t feel like I work for the White Sox,” Ozzie Guillen was saying during a tirade directed, it seemed, at people who might wonder why he’s so hard on the White Sox. “I work for the fans.”

It was Sunday afternoon, late summer, and the White Sox, then with 116 losses on the season, were playing the Oakland Athletics a few miles away at Guaranteed Rate Field. Guillen, the World Series-winning manager turned TV analyst, was watching the game in the downtown studios of NBC Sports Chicago, the team’s flagship station.

He was sitting in an oversize recliner next to the show’s host, Chuck Garfien, and he had just polished off a box of grocery store sushi.

“In the winter, I got to go to English class to see if I can find more words,” Guillen said. “I run out of words to say [about this team].”

Guillen, the famously colorful Venezuelan, and Garfien, the duo’s affable straight man, have become cult heroes to White Sox fans, delivering doses of honesty and humor — on the team-owned network, no less — during a season in which the White Sox are poised to set the record for losses in the modern era of Major League Baseball.

At the trade deadline, Guillen delivered a message to players who might be expecting a ticket out of town: “Who’d want you?”

After one particularly painful loss, Garfien literally crawled onto the set for all to see. (“I was so weakened by what just happened, I couldn’t walk,” he explained.) On the same postgame show, Guillen held a cactus near his groin and said he felt as if he had been sitting on it for nine innings.

The show even bestowed Guillen with an honorary doctorate degree for a recurring segment called “Dr. Ozzie.” Later, after yet another loss, Garfien sprawled out on a coach feigning to be Guillen’s patient.

Dr. Ozzie prescribed vodka.

“The silver lining” of this season, said one local radio host on a recent afternoon, “is Chuck and Ozzie.”

The team’s march to infamy has offered the reporting and broadcasting corps who follow the White Sox the task of documenting once-in-a-lifetime misery. That work has become historic in its own right.

Guillen said he hears regularly from front-office staff: “They say, ‘I don’t know how you do it, but [it’s] awesome!’”

“We try to be honest with the fans,” Garfien added. “And one thing about White Sox fans is: You can’t lie to them.”

‘Why do you suck?’

One September evening, the White Sox lost, 5-3, to the Cleveland Guardians for their 112th defeat of the season. They hadn’t managed a hit until the seventh inning.

After the final out, a handful of reporters dutifully trudged from the press box to the hallway outside the clubhouse for the nightly postmortem from interim manager Grady Sizemore.

How did Sizemore feel about the six no-hit innings?

“Just not a lot of good swings,” he said.

Did the losing wear on him?

“It’s not easy going out there and not getting wins, but … I am having fun,” Sizemore said. (He was not smiling.)

There is a rhythm to these sessions. Sizemore, ever the optimist, praises the team’s effort but laments the scoreboard while beat reporters balance the minutiae of any given loss with the broader failures of the season and the franchise.

“You have to kind of try to figure out a specific moment of a game — when did this one turn?” said LaMond Pope, who covers the team for the Chicago Tribune. “That’s how you go into the clubhouse versus, ‘Talk to me about your general feelings about all this.’”

For the most part, reporters said, the players have been both understanding of their circumstances and generally approachable. “A month into the year, it’s, ‘Why do you suck?’ And the answer has always been: ‘Well, we don’t want to suck. We’re trying hard not to suck.’ And they’ve answered it over and over and over again,” said Bruce Levine, a veteran baseball reporter in town.

Reporters described last season and the previous, when Tony La Russa was manager, as far more fraught than this season, which often has felt like a fait accompli.

“The clubhouse was angrier last year,” said one reporter, who, like some others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. This year, there is less tension and more jokes about the team’s oft-maligned 88-year-old owner, Jerry Reinsdorf. One reporter mused before a recent game that the White Sox needed a Nancy Pelosi to depose him like Joe Biden.

But that doesn’t make it fun or easy.

“It’s a bummer to talk to a bunch of players and coaches where nothing’s going well because for a story you usually want plot construction,” said James Fegan, who covers the team for the insightful website Sox Machine. “A problem, a proposed solution and then you can say there’s progress being seen. That progress part isn’t happening here.

“It’s like the only thing to write about this team is just how awful this thing is, which is also the only thing that everybody’s exhausted talking about.”

That awfulness has become national news and brought out some heavy-hitting reporters. (“Disaster tourism,” as Fegan called it.) On a recent afternoon, both Jeff Passan, ESPN’s top national baseball reporter, and Sam Anderson, the acclaimed writer and author, were in the Chicago clubhouse.

To illustrate how the fortunes of the White Sox have fallen so dramatically, Passan picked them to win the World Series just two years ago. He declined an interview request to discuss the prediction.

Anderson, on assignment for the New York Times magazine (and on break from writing about white rhinos in Kenya), spent a stretch of September with the team and was still getting acclimated to the mores of the clubhouse. He was gently reprimanded by the White Sox communications staff for standing too close to a one-on-one interview between Passan and a player, and again for approaching the day’s starting pitcher for an interview before the game.

“They said it was bad form,” Anderson said with a shrug.

One day in the clubhouse, he asked outfielder Andrew Benintendi if he dreamed about baseball.

“I am here on the existential meaning of losing beat,” Anderson said with a smile.

‘I had to be here’

On Tuesday night, as the White Sox avoided history for one more night, Jay Mariotti was in the stands. Mariotti spent the 1990s and 2000s writing flaming columns for the Chicago Sun-Times, plenty of them about Reinsdorf. He had a series of run-ins with Guillen, too. He hadn’t been back to Chicago lately but flew in from Santa Monica, California, and bought a ticket in section 121 behind the White Sox dugout. He was planning a column for his Substack.

“It’s all him,” Mariotti said before the game, pointing toward the owner’s box. “I had to be here.”

Guillen is convinced this White Sox team has it easier than he did, in part because of someone like Mariotti, who was the paradigm of a big-city newspaper columnist with the platform and ego to match. When he was managing, Guillen said, coverage was more pointed.

“For media in the past, it was quite different,” Guillen said, adding that some of the coverage of the team today is “(expletive) soft.”

Guillen can now, at times, be among those hardest on the team.

“If I see something I don’t like, I will say that you’re wrong,” he said. “Not because I hate you. It’s because you were wrong for this, this, this. Not because it’s Ozzie’s way. When [previous manager Pedro] Grifol was here and he says, ‘We’re not losers’ — come on, man. I get upset and I can’t sleep with this (expletive) in my stomach.” (Grifol was fired in August.)

Fans may crave Guillen’s fire during a bad season, but it’s usually hard to find on a team’s broadcast. First-year TV play-by-play broadcaster John Schriffen got into a public spat with a local radio show after he was needled by accusations of homerism on the broadcast.

“My nature is to be positive and to be excited,” Schriffen said. “But you have to temper that with how things are going this season.

“I understand the pain that [fans] are going through … but it’s not my job to pile on and be negative.”

After calling his critics “radio losers” during a broadcast, he left social media. Asked what he learned from the incident, he said, “You don’t learn anything from punching down.”

Radio analyst Darrin Jackson said his commentary is rooted in an effort to dissociate himself from the clubhouse.

“The [coaching staff and front office] are emotionally involved with what’s taking place,” he said. “They’re committed to the product, but that’s not what my responsibility is/

“I give you my description of what I’m seeing when a player is not succeeding.”

And he praised the continued fan support.

“I honestly felt there were going to be times where we show up and there’s 2,000 people here, and instead there’s 12,000, 15,000 — and you’re like, ‘Wow!,’” he said.

It’s true: The White Sox have averaged 17,000 fans this season. Also true: They have drawn the fourth fewest in baseball.

Still, no matter how bad things get, White Sox fans still have Guillen and Garfien — as long as they stay away from the cacti and vodka.

On a recent pregame, the show ran through clips of a former White Sox player, Yolmer Sánchez, who delighted in soaking himself with Gatorade baths. That reminded Guillen of his winter league championship in Venezuela.

“We are celebrating … and I told a lady in Venezuela, I don’t want to be wet and stuff,” Guillen said on the air. “She wanted to pour beer on me. I told her, I said, ‘I swear to God, if you pour that beer on me, I will break your neck!’”

“You can’t say that!” Garfien said.

“Back in Venezuela, it’s OK,” Guillen said.

“We’re changing the subject,” Garfien said. “Back to the game.”